During periods when a cell within a wireless network suffers excessive congestion, cellular capacity (i.e., wireless resources) within that cell typically become scarce. Excessive congestion within a cell may result from the simultaneous consumption of a large percentage of the available wireless resources within the cell. Various events within a cell are capable of causing such consumption; such as an emergency situation which results in an abnormally high call volume within the cell, an abnormally high number of devices simultaneously located within the cell, etc.
Scarcity of wireless resources often causes degradation of service within a cell. For example, during periods of excessive congestion, wireless resources may not be adequate to fulfill requests from devices within the cell for new wireless connections and/or to accept handoffs when devices with ongoing wireless connections approach or enter the cell. Wireless connections may include cellular calls between mobile communications devices, data transfers between mobile devices, and the like. The inability to facilitate new connections may become problematic, for example in crisis situations where emergency responders may require new connections in order to exchange vital information. Contributing to the problem is the fact that preemption of ongoing cellular calls is often prohibited, precluding the disconnection of those calls to allow connections for the emergency responders to be fulfilled. Congestion within a cell may also cause service quality to degrade below guaranteed levels for premium subscribers.
A typical solution employed during periods of excess cell congestion is to provide high priority users, such as emergency responders, priority access to wireless resources as they become available. However, a major shortcoming to this approach is that resources may become available slowly during such periods of congestion, causing holding periods for resource availability to become excessive. Thus, emergency responders may still be prevented from gaining timely access to wireless resources.